In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which will oversee the programme, confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to “strengthen Israeli public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information consumption”.

The government’s hand is to be invisible to the foreign audiences. Daniel Seaman, the official who has been planning the effort, wrote in a letter on 5 August to a body authorising government projects that “the idea requires not making the role of the state stand out and therefore it is necessary to adhere to great involvement of the students themselves, without political linkage or affiliation”.

According to the plan, students are to be organised into units at each university, with a chief co-ordinator who receives a full scholarship, three desk co-ordinators for language, graphics and research who receive lesser scholarships and students termed “activists” who will receive a “minimal scholarship”.

Mr Netanyahu’s aides said the main topics the units would address related to political and security issues, combating calls to boycott Israel and combating efforts to question Israel’s legitimacy. The officials said the students would stress Israeli democratic values, freedom of religion and pluralism.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/students-offered-grants-if-they-tweet-proisraeli-propaganda-8760142.html

Daniel Seaman

Seaman is expected to assume a new senior position as head of the interactive media unit, which will be part of the national public diplomacy unit. One of the projects of the new interactive media unit, which will be in charge of coordinating the public diplomacy efforts of the Prime Minister’s Office on the Internet and the social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, will be the launching of “covert units” within Israel’s seven universities that will engage in online public diplomacy, as reported on Tuesday in Haaretz.

Messages Seaman has posted on his Facebook page raise serious doubts as to the degree to which good judgment is exercised by someone who is slated to be the chief official in the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for Israel’s public diplomacy efforts on the various social networks on the Internet. A series of messages that he has posted over the past few months include abusive, even racist, statements directed against Muslims in general and senior Palestinian leaders in particular, as well as against countries that are thought to be Israel’s allies.

For instance, on August 8, two days after the memorial day marking the World War Two atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which killed over 100,000 civilians, Seaman posted: “I am sick of the Japanese, ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Peace’ groups the world over holding their annual self righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the consequence of Japanese aggression. You reap what you sow.

“Instead, they should be commemorating the estimated 50 million Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Malay, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Burmese and other victims of Japanese imperial aggression and genocide. Not to mention nearly 120,000 Allied military casualties who fought to defeat the genocidal Japanese. These are who deserve to be and should be remembered this week.”

continued.